There are fears Conservatives may try to undermine encryption too.

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Theresa May, who retains her position as Home Secretary after last week's general election, has indicated that bringing back the "Snooper's Charter" is a priority for the UK's new Conservative government. According to the Guardian, she told the BBC: "David Cameron has already said, and I’ve said, that a Conservative government would be giving the security agencies and law enforcement agencies the powers that they need to ensure they’re keeping up to date as people communicate with communications data."

May made clear that it was only because of a veto by the Liberal Democrats in the previous coalition government that the Draft Communications Data Bill (aka the Snooper's Charter) was dropped when it was first presented. She added: "we are determined to bring that [legislation] through, because we believe that is necessary to maintain the capabilities for our law enforcement agencies such that they can continue to do the excellent job, day in and day out, of keeping us safe and secure."

In its manifesto, the Conservative party wrote: "we continue to reject any suggestions of sweeping, authoritarian measures that would threaten our hard-won freedoms." It also attempted to distinguish between metadata and content retention: "We will keep up to date the ability of the police and security services to access communications data—the ‘who, where, when and how’ of a communication, but not its content."

However, speaking from Russia at a conference in Australia on Friday evening, the whistleblower Edward Snowden warned against accepting this distinction: "The impacts of metadata can’t be overstated, they are collecting data on everyone regardless of wrongdoing. When you have metadata, it’s a proxy for content, so when politicians split hairs about metadata you should be very sceptical." He went on to say that adopting these data retention laws was a "radical departure from the operation of traditional liberal societies around the world," and pointed out that mass surveillance had not stopped the Sydney siege, the Boston marathon bombings, or the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in France.

Further Reading

The Open Rights Group (ORG) blog notes the Conservative manifesto contains other proposals with implications for the online world, including scrapping the Human Rights Act, forcing Internet service providers to block sites, and requiring age verification for access to sites containing pornographic material. In addition, there is also the issue of David Cameron's remarks earlier this year that encryption is a "problem" for government surveillance, when he said: "The question is are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: no, we must not."

Although the Conservatives gained an absolute majority in the new UK Parliament, the Open Rights Group points out that passing controversial legislation such as undermining encryption or mandating metadata retention will not be easy: "The light at the end of the tunnel is that the Conservatives' majority is tiny. Their leadership will have to work incredibly hard to secure a majority for new laws. Every MP's vote will count and this presents a huge opportunity for campaigns like ORG's to influence what happens." It's still early days, but it's clear that online rights are likely to emerge as one of the most fiercely-contested areas of the new Parliament's legislative programme.